Bathurst Mews House is the quiet transformation of a mid-terrace mews house in Bayswater, completely remade within to the EnerPHit standard while its face to the street, and the character that makes the mews worth keeping, remains untouched.
Client: Mr + Mrs Beverley Birch
Location: Bayswater / Tyburnia, London, W2
Local Authority: Westminster Council
Plot Type: Urban
Project Type: Residential – Single Family Home
Internal Area (GIA): 151 sqm
Sustainability: EnerPHit
Bathurst Mews is a cobbled lane behind the stuccoed avenues of Bayswater, a street built for horses and carriages that has settled, over a century and a half, into one of London's quietest residential pockets. There is a particular atmosphere here: the sound of footsteps on cobbles, the modest scale of the houses, brickwork softened by weather and time. This project began with a conviction that none of that should be touched, and that everything behind it could be quietly remade.
The house is organised around a single gesture: a sculptural stair that winds through the full height of the section, from basement to a new planted roof terrace. It draws daylight deep into the plan, through a rooflight set into the pitch and down past each landing, so that light becomes the material that binds the house together. At the top, a sunken stair opens onto the terrace itself, a hidden garden above the rooftops.
The material palette is drawn from what the hand wants to touch. Lime plaster and limewash give the walls a soft, breathing surface that holds light rather than reflecting it. Limestone floors run through the ground and basement levels, cool and dense underfoot. Reclaimed timber carries the marks of its previous life. These are materials chosen for how a room feels at seven in the morning in January, and because they let the nineteenth-century fabric manage moisture as it always has.
That feeling of stillness and even warmth is no accident. Beneath the finishes, the house has been rebuilt to the EnerPHit standard: a continuous insulated and airtight envelope, triple-glazed timber windows, fresh filtered air supplied silently through heat recovery, solar panels out of the street's sight. The result is a calm the occupants sense before they can name it. No draughts, no cold corners, rooms that hold their temperature the way a thick-walled building should always have done.
From the cobbles, nothing has changed: original brickwork, sash windows, the unassuming scale that makes the mews what it is. Inside is a house made for another century of quiet domestic life, proof that the deepest form of care for an old building is to make it beautiful to live in again.
